@DATABASE UPGRADE_WB @AUTHOR PJHutchison @$VER: 1.0 @REMARK 8th May 1997 @NODE MAIN "Upgrading WB" @{u}@{b}Upgrading Workbench (freely)@{ub}@{uu} Welcome to my latest guide about how to upgrade Workbench without much cost using freeware or shareware now widely available from BBS' and Aminet (via Internet or on CD). @{"Standard Workbench" link STD_WB} @{"Preferences " link PREFS} @{"Top Essential programs" link ESSEN} @{"Replacement WB programs" link REPLACE} @{"Additional Programs " link ADDPROG} @{"Libraries " link LIBS} @{"Backdrops and icons " link ICONS} @{"Contacting the Author " link AUTHOR} @ENDNODE @NODE STD_WB "The standard Workbench" The current version of Workbench is 3.1 and is available for all Amigas from the lowly A500 to the new A4000T. It comes on 6 disks: Workbench, Extras, Storage, Fonts, Locale and Install. Utilities and tools are few and basic and rather old. Workbench uses four colours for its default screen mode and its icons and looks dated although much better than 1.3's color scheme. The main utilities provided are as follows: Multiview - Text, AmigaGuide, sound and picture viewer. Dependant on Datatype to view other formats. More - A rather old text viewer Clock - Displays an analogic or digital clock in a window Emacs - Complex and old text editor IconEditor - Program to create icons Calculator - Run of the mill calculator. No complex functions available though Keyshow - Displays whats returned on the current keymap. ShowConfig - Displays system configuration in a console window. Not very user-friendly and limited features. CMD - Redirects printer output to a file Printfiles - Prints text files GraphicDump - Prints graphics. Limited quality best for Dot Matrix printers only. Commodities - Various commodities which affect the screen and input. PrepCard - Prepare various PCMCIA memory cards Format - Formats disks using OFS/FFS or other formats including PC disks in drivers are loaded. RexxMast - Starts ARexx control program FixFonts - Updates FONTS: directory NoFastMem - Turns off fast memory for older programs Intellifont - Installs Compugraphic fonts As you can see the utilities are nothing to shout about and since WB has been output PD authors have produced better programs to replace them. @ENDNODE @NODE PREFS "Setting up Preferences for you." Workbench preferences change the way the Workbench works, looks and feels. The main programs to use are: ScreenMode - Sets the resolution and number of colours for Workbench. Using a higher resolution will give you greater working space. The type of monitor will determine what modes are available. WBPattern - Sets up patterns for Workbench background, its windows and the screen. You can create your own pattern or use a picture to display instead. Using this program can turn your dull WB into something more pleasing! Font - This selects the font for the Default System, Icon text and Screen Text. Installing new fonts into your Fonts: directory can improve readability and if you want use really fancy fonts for that extra individual look. Sound - If error messages or other messages appear you can set which sound to play when it occurs. The program is rather limited as only one sound can be played for all events. Palette - This program will set the colours to be used by Workbench. If your screen has more colours, the icons will look much better. Common palette is Magic Workbench which uses blues, greys and pink colours. @ENDNODE @NODE ESSEN "Top 20 Essential programs" The following list is only a guide and may or may not meet everyone's tastes, so apologies if it doesn't include your favourite or includes a program you hate. These programs are considered to be essential, something Commodore, forgot to include or never got round to writing one. They are not in any specific order. 1. @{b}ToolManager.@{ub} Allows you to add menu items to the 'Tools' menu in Workbench (a daft oversight by Commodore). Also, allows to provide docks, sounds, icons or access objects on the Workbench. Saves time by providing short cuts to your favourite programs. 2. @{b}ReOrg@{ub} After a lot of use, your Hard Disk will suffer from @{i}framentation @{ui} and will take longer to boot and load files. The program will optimize your hard disk and make it faster. 3. @{b}FastView@{ub} A very good picture viewer program which will view all sorts of pictures in various formats, includes animations and various other options. 4. @{b}BED@{ub} The Editors provided by Workbench are very old and limited. BED or Blacks Editor is a reasonable small text editor which is Freeware. There are lots of other editors about, some specialised, some complex and some simple ones. Another editor worthy of mention is @{b}GoldED @{ub}. 5. @{b}DiskSalv@{ub} This program has saved me a lot of trouble in the past and it is essential you get this (or a equivalent). Repairs disks and undeletes files for you. Version 2 is shareware and widely available, newer versions are commercial. Another salvage program is Quarterback Tools. 6. @{b}HDToolbox@{ub} Another essential utility as it preps your hard disk. Not everyone gets this but if you can get hold of it then you can manager your hard disk better. As well as settings up hard disks and partitions it can also Verify the Data Surface and map out those annoying bad blocks which DiskSalv cannot fix. Other prep software worth having is RDPrep and GVPPrep. 7. @{b}SnoopDOS@{ub} This program can help you when your programs stop working. It will display all the libraries, drives, config files and so on programs access and whether it was successful or not. An absolutely brilliant program to have. 8. @{b}AIBB@{ub} Ever wondered how fast your Amiga runs or what the configuration is then AIBB (Amiga Intuition Based Benchmarks) is the program to have. Lots of modules are available that give the setup and speed results for different Amigas and accelerator boards. A simpler and older program to look out for is @{b}SysInfo@{ub} but its Speed calculation is source for controversy! Another new program to look out for is @{b}SysSpeed@{ub} which will speed test your hardware too! 9. @{b}XOper@{ub} This advanced program will display tasks, libraries,devices and other resources and allows you full control of tasks and intuition. A good program but be careful it can crash your Amiga! 10. @{b}Installer@{ub} Most Amiga programs are installed by this recent program which uses a standard interface to install other programs for you. Ensure that you have the latest version (V43) which fixes most of the bugs. 11. @{b}LHA/LZX/DMS@{ub} These are the most common @{b}archiver@{ub} programs for the Amiga. If you use Comms/BBS' or the Internet a lot and download files then you will need these to unarchive them. If the CLI gives you the shivers then there are plenty of Archive GUI Interface programs around to make it easier. LHA and LZX are file archivers while DMS (Disk Masher) is a disk archiver. 12. @{b}ARQ@{ub} Requesters in Workbench are quite boring, so ARQ provides animated requesters instead and if you set up UPD as well, you can play your favourite samples as well such as an Explosion if a disasterous error occurs, or a Scream if the Amiga Gurus. Great fun! 13. @{b}VirusZ II@{ub} Unfortunately, Viruses occur on the Amiga and to protect your self you must have a Virus checker program to detect and remove virus. VirusZ is a popular memory resident virus checker. There are many other Virus checkers available but make sure it doesn't go out of date...!!! 14. @{b}HippoPlayer@{ub} If you enjoy listening to music then this essential utility is a must as it will play most music modules (MODs), there are thousands of modules available especially on Aminet Mirror sites! Other players are about including @{b}OctaMEDPlayer@{ub} which specifically plays MED modules. 15. @{b}PicBoot@{ub} Sick of looking at a boring screen when booting your Amiga? Well, Picboot allows you to display any ILBM picture while your Amiga is booting up. 16. @{b}ValidateWait@{ub} Has your Amiga ever crashed and then the hard disk is invalidated? If so, then if you reboot, the Amiga tries to Validate the HD while booting up and causes a lot of disk thrashing. To prevent this, include ValidateWait in your startup-sequence to wait until validation is finished before booting up the Amiga. A useful util to have about. 17. @{b}Assign Manager@{ub} A lot of Amiga programs require assigns to be set up for it to be used and that can make your user-startup very, very big and slow down booting up. Assigns allow you to make ALL your assigns in one go with just one command! Includes a prefs program to add or delete any assigns without resorting to Editing user-startup. @ENDNODE @NODE REPLACE "Replacement Programs" Amiga Workbench comes with a few utility programs to look at files, print them out and enhance the way your Amiga works. Unfortunately, over time they have become quite dated. Now, there are thousands of Public Domain and Shareware programs available to update them with more features and enhance current facilities. @{"Utilities drawer " link UTILS} @{"System drawer " link SYSTEM} @{"Tools drawer " link TOOLS} @{"Commodities " link COMMOD} @{"AmigaDOS " link ADOS} @{"Workbench " link WORKB} @ENDNODE @NODE UTILS "Utilities Drawer" These are general utility programs. @{b}MULTIVIEW@{ub} This is the Amiga's main AmigaGuide/Text/Picture viewer. Although its great, it is not the quickest. You could replace it with more specialised and faster programs: Picture Viewers - THere are many picture viewers with built-in code to read other file types much faster than Multiview. e.g. ViewTek, FastView, Visage, PPShow etc. Text Viewers - There hundreds of text viewers from the simple TYPE and MORE programs to more advanced viewers with XPK support, search facilities, Guide compatible and so on. e.g. Muchmore, less, MUIMore, PowerGuide, AmigaGuide. Sound/Music Players Multiview supports 8SVX but there are many other modules types which it does not support. A dedicated music player(s) is required. e.g. HippoPlayer, Octamed Player, HD-Play, Eagle Player etc. @{b}CLOCK@{ub} The standard clock is rather old and can be a nusiance as it opens a window to display the time. Replacement clocks now put the date and time on the Screen menu bar out of the way at the top of the screen. @{b}MORE@{ub} This is a very old and limited text viewer. Replace it straight away with something more powerful. A good one is @{b}MuchMore@{ub} which include searching and supports XPK'd files which take up less space than uncompressed files! @ENDNODE @NODE SYSTEM "System Drawer" The system drawer contains programs to look after the Operating System and the hardware is uses. Some programs such as Format, DiskCopy are called via Workbench's menus. @{b}SHELL@{ub} The shell is a useful and powerful feature to access the AmigaOS. If you find the standard CON: window limited, why not replace it with a new Shell replacement. A favourite is @{b}KingCON@{ub} with menus, filename completion, history, scroll bars etc. @{b}FORMAT@{ub} The standard format command supports many storage devices but falls down in some departments. You keep having to set the options for the perticular devices you want to format and defaults to 'Empty'. A good replacement is @{b}MyFormat@{ub} which add BadSector, BadTrack options, and the option to save a bootblock - a major oversight on CBM's Format command. @{b}DISKCOPY@{ub} The standard diskcopy program is quite slow but reliable, if you wish to copy other disks quicker or copy Non-DOS disks then you will require more specialised copier programs such as DCOpy, AFCopy. @ENDNODE @NODE TOOLS "Tools Drawer" @{b}ICONEDIT@{ub} The standard Icon editor supplied is limited in many ways. You cannot create large icons or icons with many colours. It is usually better to use a paint package, such as PPaint to create your icons, and import them into IconEdit to save as icons. @{b}Iconian@{ub} is an excellent IconEdit replacement with a bigger editing area and lots of features! @{b}PRINTFILES@{ub} This is a standard text printing utility which requires a shift-click with a file to print it. It will print the entire file. Many text editors and text editors have better features than this program. @{b}CALCULATOR@{ub} This is a simple calculator program with no other functions than add, subtract, multiply and divide. There are many calculator replacements some more specialised than others. For advanced calculations, a spread sheet program is needed, such as TurboCalc. @{b}SHOWCONFIG@{ub} This program displays the hardware configuration of your Amiga. Unfortunately, it cannot easily identify cards added to the system and doesn't display other items such as Hard disks or cD-ROM drives. The best programs to use are: SysInfo, AIBB, ShowConfigEnh, SysSpeed. @{b}GRAPHICDUMP@{ub} This program outputs pictures to the printer and results can be rather disappointing on modern printers. Results can be better from a Paint package or from a Dump program supplied with a commercial print driver such as EnPrint, TurboPrint, Studio II. @ENDNODE @NODE COMMOD "Commodities" Commodities are programs which run in the background and wait for various intuition events to occur whether from the keyboard, mouse, or window changes or insertion of floppy disks. They can affect how things happen via patches and so on. @{b}EXCHANGE@{ub} To control commodity programs there is the Exchange program which can display Commodity's interface and end commodity programs. There are a few commodity exchange replacements which do similar things using different interface libraries such as MUI, BGUI etc. Ones to look out for are: Mexch, CxBar, Magic_Exchange and BExchange. @{b}BLANKER@{ub} This is a rather generic and dull screen blanker to save on monitor burn in. It just displays some multi-color animated lines on the screen. There are better replacements with a choice of animations such as BlitzBlanker, BServe, GershneBlanker etc. @{b}MOUSEBLANKER, AUTOPOINT, NOCAPSLOCK, CLICKTOFRONT@{ub} These are simple commodities that affect windows, the mouse and the keyboard. Instead of having more than one program loaded, some people have written multi-commodity programs that can do lots of things. Ones to look out for are MCP, MCX and YAK. @ENDNODE @NODE ADOS "AmigaDOS (CLI/Shell)" AmigaDOS Shell commands that reside in the C: directory can also be updated with more up-to-date versions. There are replacements for LIST, DIR, SEARCH, EXECUTE, AVAIL, RequestChoice and so on. @ENDNODE @NODE WORKB "Workbench Replacements" If you find Workbench itself too limiting them there are replacements for that too! File Managers such as Dir Opus, DiskMaster, SID and so forth are quite popular. If you find the Information menu option too limiting then why not add @{b}SWAZINFO@{ub} to add some pretty useful options such as file requesters for default tool. Ability to change the file type and get directory sizes! @ENDNODE @NODE ADDPROG "Additional programs" Other programs which may turn out useful, but not essential, to Workbench are worth installing to make Workbench easier to use. @{b}FILEFINDER@{ub} If you have a large hard disk and want to find a certain file which you know you have but unsure where it is then this program will be handy. All it does is search a given disk for one or more files using a given filename pattern and lists the path and names found. @{b}VERSIONWB@{ub} The Version command supplied by Workbench is not without its bugs and crashes sometimes on managled version strings esp. the math libraries. If you have a large collection of programs, libraries and datatypes and want to keep them up-to-date then this program will ensure that the files you have are the latest by displaying its version number and date is was written or released. @{b}ICONCOPY@{ub} Copying icons between files is impossible under Workbench but it is possible using the Shell or a File Manager. IconCopy (or even SwazInfo) is a very useful program to copy icons between files and it keeps the destinations stack and tooltype settings. Unfortunately, if the file does not have an .info file to start off with, it tends to default to the Tool type and requires changing by IconEdit to its proper type. @{b}GUIARC@{ub} If you handle many archived files with LZX, LHA and DMS then using the Shell can be a nusiance. GuiArc provides a Workbench interface which allows you to add, view and extract files from archives. @{b}FILEX@{ub} If you ever needed to look at the contents of files such as Programs at byte level then this program is for you. You can see the files in hex or ascii and search for strings of bytes or hidden messages. @{b}SCSI_LIST@{ub} If you have a SCSI adapter on your system and wish to find out whether all the devices are connected properly then this program can display all the devices connected to the SCSI chain with name and other details. @ENDNODE @NODE LIBS "Libraries" AmigaOS uses shared libraries for its operation and this allows programmers to expand and enhance the Amiga by writing and releasing their own libraries. There are hundreds and hundreds of libraries, some are specific to particular applications and some are more general and can be used by any program. @{b}MUI - Magic User Interface@{ub} Workbench programs used to use Intuition for WB1.3 and then GadTools for WB2/WB3. MUI is a replacement user interface library system for programs to provide a powerful and pleasing graphical user interface. It is getting popular but requires an expanded system to make full use of it. @{b}ARP, REQ and REQTOOLS@{ub} Until WB2.04, programmers had to write their own File Requesters from scratch for their programs and ARP (Amiga Replacement Project) provided a library to fix this oversight. Req and Reqtools replaced ARP and CBM's ASL library. @{b}EXPLODE, POWERPACKER, CRM, XFDMASTER, XPKMASTER, DECRUNCH@{ub} These libraries provide functions to compress files and then decompress files usually in real-time by compress-aware programs such as PPMore, PPShow, Muchmore and many other programs. They are helpful when space is at a premium and compressing large files and saving them to disk would free up vital space and using a program to decompress them for you when you need to view or modify them. @{b}IXEMUL@{ub} This library provides Unix type functions to AmigaOS and makes it easy for certain Unix programs to be easily converted to the Amiga. @{b}TRANSLATOR@{ub} This library is an uptodate speech synthesis with locale support for the Amiga and can now be used on Amigas with WB2 or better! @ENDNODE @NODE ICONS "Backdrops and icons" Workbench uses a standard 4 colour icon system which is quite bland and boring. To improve the way Workbench looks, there are replacement icon collections available to make Workbench more colourful: @{b}MAGIC WORKBENCH@{ub} This a a direct icon replacement using 8 colour icons using a grey/blue/ pink type palette. It is very popular and doesn't require much extra system resources to ensure speed isn't affected. @{b}NEWICONS@{ub} This is a specail icon replacement. Instead of using normal icon images like Workbench, the images are stored in the icon's tooltypes and the standard icon image appear as small squares. A program is required to be run to see the new style icons. The icons appear as 3D colourful icon and look completely different to the normal Workbench icons. @{b}MULTI-COLOR ICONS@{ub} There other other sets of icons with more colours, typically 16 and 256 colour icons but can slow down Workbench as the more bitplanes required for the icons make bigger .info files. These are ideal for people with graphics cards which can cope with these larger icons. @{b}BACKDROPS@{ub} As well as improved icons the Workbench screen can be made to be more interesting by either using patterns or pictures called backdrops and this can be set up using the WBPATTERN preferences program to automatically load a picture onto the Workbench screen. The picture must match the screen depth and palette in use. @ENDNODE @NODE AUTHOR "The Author" This guide has been written for those people would like to make their Workbench more up to date and more productive for their use. I hope some of the information will be useful. Almost all the programs described can be readily installed and used from the many utility collections, the best place is the Aminet archives either via the Internet or on CD. There are some CDs with Workbench Enhancements included as one collection and are worth looking at. How to contact me: Peter Hutchison E-Mail: P.J.Hutchison@hud.ac.uk or pjhutch@blizzard.u-net.com Fidonet: 2:250/366.24 Other Guides to look out for: The Printer Guide Workbench 1.3 Guide Expanding the Amiga Guide PC Task Guide See Aminet/docs/help or hyper for the above. @ENDNODE