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There's not much discussion of Music Studio these days. It was
a dissapointment when it came out. It has been upgraded, but I'm
pretty sure it's not the most popular in the Amiga community.
Deluxe Music Construction Set and Sonix are the two big music
composition and editing programs. DMCS is generally considered
a better 'word processor' for music, but Sonix has enhanced instrument
editing capabilities and (in my opinion) cleaner sounding instruments.
Paint programs... Deluxe Paint II is the premier program (and the
grandaddy of 'em all). It works in all Amiga modes except HAM (Hold
and Modify, which allows you to have all 4096 colors on the screen at
once). You can paint on an area larger than the physical screen. There
is support for brushes, perspective, color cycling, you name it. There
are several dedicated HAM painting programs, such as Photon Paint and
DigiPaint.
One of the Amiga's strongest points is the true interchangability
of graphics and sound between different packages. The IFF (Interchange
File Format) was hammered out by Electronic Arts and Commodore early
in the Amiga's life. Developers abide by IFF standards with religeous
zeal. I haven't yet seen an application where graphics wouldn't
interchange. Commodore continuously approves new IFF formats for
animations, sound, text, solid objects, etc.
A typical example follows: (true story)
My wife wanted to make a small birthday card for her brother. She
wanted to take him out for a free meal on Martha's Vineyard. She
asked me if I had any artwork of fancy meals. I laughed at first,
then remembered that I had a beautiful digitized HAM photo of a bottle
of Almaden wine sitting on a gourmet table. It was part of a demo
disk that I had lying around.
So, we loaded the HAM image into a image processing program (PixMate)
and made some edge enhancements that brought out the wine bottle more
clearly. Then, we loaded ProWrite (a MacWrite type word processor that
accepts any IFF graphic) and remapped the image from 4096 colors into 8
colors. Note that I could have done this from either Pixmate or
ProWrite. Also note that I never exited Pixmate while making these
edits. PixMate was still loaded and ready on a second custom screen
just one mouse click away. Satisfied with the resulting image, she
typed in a few cute naughty messages using some Miami Vice type fonts
about an inch tall, and we then printed out the results using the
printer driver's antialiasing and smoothing options. The final result,
off of a $200 OkiMate color printer, looked like a store bought card
from two feet away. (And it only cost $4000 for all the equipment
to make it! What a bargain, huh?) Total time spent: under 15 minutes.
Anyway, you get the picture. IFF is constantly evolving to encompass
more formats, while retaining backwards compatibility.
Games - Must Haves:
Faery Tale Adventure - 18,000 scrolling screens, fantastic animation
and sound, and about three months worth of your time to solve the
adventure.
Marble Madness - As good as the arcade version.
Interceptor - The best jet fighter simulator ever seen on a micro.
The personal favorite of Jay Miner, father of the Amiga architecture.
Leader Board - First rate golf simulator.
FirePower - The ultimate 'tank' game. Smooth scrolling graphics
and sounds that will drive your neighbors crazy. The enemy soldiers
squish sickeningly when you run them over, leaving little blood
spots on the ground.
Obliterator - cyber punk futuristic arcade type adventure with a
sound track that has to be heard to be believed.
Capone looks pretty, but I read a review that labeled it as a mindless
shoot-em-up. Figures simply move across the screen, you have to
blast them. Sounds boring.
All of the Cinemeware titles have spectacular graphics and sound
(especially the Three Stooges) but the game play is generally pretty
poor by modern standards. Worth the price just to see the Amiga
do it's thing, though. I recently brought my A2000 to work for
a few days. When I was finally able to pry about 15 people away
from Interceptor, I caused mass jaw damage by running the Three
Stooges.
Hope this helps. Most of the titles mentioned here have their own
note somewhere in here. If you do "DIR/TITLE=***" you might find
more details.
Ed.
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