Amiga Computing - Commodore Is Awesome

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II of you, I hope, have some sort of
directory and file utility running
on your Amiga, and some of you
may even have Directory Opus, a
program that simply cnes out for
configuration. the topic of this month's
medical
To make best use of DOpus you should try
to give as much space as possible to the
directory windows: use a small font for the
buttons and title bars, run in a higher
resolution, that son of thing_ Then finally, and
most importantly. do some surgery on those
buttons.
One of the first things I changed when I got
my copy of DOpus was the fact that although
you could copy files to the destination
GUI: Graphical User Interface. A visually-oriented system allowing
you to tell a computer what to do by using visuals symbols rather
than typing in commands.
HAM: Hold And Modify. An Amiga graphics mode that allows all
the 4096 colours in an ECS-based Amiga's palette to be displayed
on screen at once,
IDE• Integrated Drive Electronics. The other popular hard drive
standard OE drives don't rend to be as fast as SCSI ones and due
to lortaDons within the IDE spec, can't go up to sizes as large as
SCSI.
IFP Interchange File Format. Although people refer to pictures on
the Amiga as being IFF, this is not strictly true. IFF is a standard
developed by Commodore for creating file formats that can be used
with any machine and any hie type.
Thus Amiga pictures are actually in the ILBM (qv.) format, IFF
directory by dragging and dropping them,
you unpacked LHA archives by doing the
same thing. Uh-uh No. LHA is a distinct file
type, so it is really easy to set up a command
for DOpus to use if you double-dick on it.
Make the CIKk-M-Clicti function into copy, the
same as it is fox normal files, and make extract
a double-click function.
Following this, lets play around with those
Copy, Copy As, Move, Move As buttons I like
the simplicity that single key shortcuts give,
whereby if you want to copy something you
hit the C' key. Why not duplicate this in
DOpus and go further - make Copy As 'shift
c', and Move V and Move As -
shift V O K ,
Look no Workbe nch, ma l And a synchronoos opossums to boot. be sa id In a smug voice
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you've still got Delete to assign to a
keyboard shortcut - you could use "x' to
carry the analogy further - but there is a key
just crying out to be used as a shortcut for
this command: the 'Del' key.
Okay. now were rolling. There are actually
filetypes set up for more file types than
DOpus actually has commands for in the
default configuration, so let's make use Of
some of those If you own a copy of GPFax,
you can get DOpus to show all your FAKt
files - you can also get DOpus to show 24-bit
pictures on a non-24-bit system by assigning
the Jpea and ILEM 24-bit filetypes to a viewer
like Viewtek
There s now a utility you could run from
DOpus to view Imagine and Lightwave
objects in a window so you can pick out all
your 3D models. If you are lucky enough to
own a 24-bit display card of some
description, you can set up filetypes to show
24-bit arid Jpeged pictures on that, along
with 24-bit animatiori formats like AVI or
Mpeg - provided your card has software that
supports those file formats.
Another ding I don't like about DOpus is
its dnvelist buttons. If you re-read the list in
the ConfigDopus program, they lose all their
Acronym alert - part two: G-P
sound samples are in the 8SVX format. etc.
IL8M InterLeaved &Map. The Amiga IFF picture file format.
JPEG: Joint Photographic Expert Group. The now famoos
interpretive image format which can make still 24-bit images as
small as lit 00th of their original size. See also MPEG_
SAM,: Memory Management Unit. For a 68020 the MMU is a
separate chip called the 68851. In a full 68030 not 68ECO301 or
68040, the MMU is inside the main chip.
MPEG: Motion Picture Expert Group. A new standard required for
animations. MPEGs are like a single JPEG image followed by a
stream of delta images (delta images only store the changes
between the previous frame and the current frame) interspersed
with further JPEG images to act as checkpoints
PCSACIA: Personal Computer Memory Card International
Association.
Amiga Computing
MAY 1 995
Amiga Medical Part 4
shortcuts. never bother So I P y
to use it, except for those
1
first six buttons. If I want to get easy access to
an assign, say, or a drive that might not be
on my system all the time, like a CD-ROM or
ParNET. I make a normal button for it This
has the added advantage that you can have
two complementary drives in the same place,
accessed by clicking either the left or right
mouse button For instance, I now have a
button that has Downloads: on one side and
Uploads: on the other. You can do the same.
If you are running DOpus on a
Workbench 3.* machine, what about
viewing AmigaGuide documents on the
same screen? Make a button for this, or
create a filetype to recognise AmigaGuide
documents as opposed to plain ASCII text
files /Have a took at some AmigaGuide
documents, they always contain the word
'database' at the start, so you can use the
'Match' command to check for this). Then
specify an ArnigDOS command to view the
AmigaGuide documents:
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08StAtEi
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When o you double-dick on one of these
documents. e the Multiview window will
appear u on your DOpus screen instead of the
Workbench. t
. One more thing. Are you still opening up
a shell l window and typing: en S•startuo
sequence. • Make a button in DOpus that lets
you edit all those script files without having
to enter their names by hand. In addition to
Startup-sequence and user-startup, you might
also consider adding Ed-startup. if you use Ed
a lot. Shell-startup, if you use the shell a lot,
and if you run Parnet quite often, what
about button. an If you - want to run other programs
Edit from within DOpus. like Multiview make sure
NetS you have the Asynchronous nag switched
ys/ on. so you don I have to wait until you've
sista finished reading that document. or
aup- whatever, before you can get on and copy
sequ some files.
ence'
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