What to get on Aminet
Erik Elgersma grabs a shovel, a metal detector, and starts looking for golden archives.
Ratings:
10 - An archive twice as good as a slap from a wet kipper!
9 - A truly amazing archive, but...
8 - An archive that's well worth having bar some imperfections
7 - A great download, but some hassles/questionmarks
6 - Good stuff, but that not everyone will like
5 - Well, it showed some potential, but that hasn't been exploited
4 - Not worth having, leave it alone
3 - The less said about this the better
2 - This should be deleted from the Aminet asap
1 - Completely useless, crap, stupid software that should never have been written.
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Doom_FAQ03.txt (9K)When the Doom source code was released last winter, thinks started happening rather quickly, first there was one port, then two, three etc. Some required ixemul, or an FPU, some could use Doom2 wads aswell while others couldn't, etc. etc. For a lot of people things unsurprisingly quickly became very confusing and lots of folks were unsure how to get the most out of Doom on their Amiga. This FAQ doc by Nicolas Piper aims to rectify that, and help them on their way to Doom-playing heaven. So I expected precise requirements, instructions on how to use flags after the doom.exe, an explanation of getting Doom running using a TCP/IP stack for Deathmatches, clear pointers as to which port was best suited to which type of Amiga, and things like that. Alas, this is merely a quickly drafted collection of loading instructions, cheats etc. (most of which is simply copied straight from the readme's included in the archives), and it isn't up to date either as no mention is made of DoomAttack or the lesser known PSIDoom. All of the info in here can be had straight from the Am!Doom download page which most folks would have downloaded it from anyway. Mark:3
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Accelerators.lha (9K)Accelerators nowadays are a pretty standard part of every serious Amiga user's system, so this won't be useful for most Amiga users, or so you'd think. In fact this AmigaGuide doc is also useful when looking to upgrade; it outlines in detail the 68K range, is pretty up-to-date and thus even has some techy info on the 603/604 range of PPC processors. This doc covers almost everything to do with accelerators, like what advantages they can give, the importance of a plentiful of RAM, and what models are available for what machine. In fact it has a very extensive list of accelerators, from 28Mhz 680000 accels for A500s to PPC Cyberstorms for A4000s. The author really seems to know in depth what he's on about here, and he's brought this extensive accelerator AmigaGuide in a way that's also interesting to read. Mark:8
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AmigaMP3.lha (37K)This is the offline version of a website devoted to MP3 or MPEG Layer 3 players, like Songplayer and Mpega, and encoders. It's reasonably useful, all the players and encoders are linked to for download, but other than that it's no better than scrummaging through Aminet for 5 minutes, downloading Mpega and Songplayer, deciding which is best and using it. That's what I did I while back and this doc contains absolutely nothing I didn't know already. As a website it's ok because you can download the stuff, but obviously that's a bit tricky in the offline version. It isn't a great info resource either as it doesn't even explain what MPEG Layer 3 is exactly or what's so great about it. Mark:5
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Amiga Networking FAQ (84K)This FAQ as the title nicely suggests is all about networking solutions for your Amiga, whether it be to another Amiga, a PC, Mac, or the Internet. It is fairly extensive, and has clearly been worked on by lots of people for quite some time. This doc does what it says on the box, it tells you all about the different networking solutions available for your Amiga, through your basic Parnet solution, or via Arcnet, right the way up to Ethernet. The only snag I have with this doc is that to the avarage user just getting started linking his A500 to his new A1200 or so this is going to sound very techy, and confusing. It has more than it's fair share of tech talk and jargon. Having networked Amigas with some friends years back meant I could just about follow if I paid attention, but others may not which is a shame. Mark:6
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Multimedia.lha (23K)Another very extensive doc, this contains everything you need to know about MPEG audio, video, Quicktime and AVI videos. It achieves this by incorporating other docs who have specialised in one format. It contains not only info on what programs are on offer to play these types of files on the Amiga, but also how to get the most from the programs around, and how to get the best possible output for your system. With MPEG audio for example, it has extensive instructions on how to change from and MP3 to an MP2 file thus gaining better output on lower spec (read 030 downwards) Amigas, with full download URLs for the programs required and even an example AmigaDOS script that'll do it all for you. Good stuff indeed. I'm having a go myself soon! Mark:9
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